- Home
- Idioms
- get (one's) fingers burned
get (one's) fingers burned
get (one's) fingers burned
To suffer an unpleasant or ruinous consequence (especially the loss of money) for some action, often such that one becomes unwilling or uneager to do it again. During the boom times, countless would-be investors put everything they owned in shady investment deals, and most of them ended up getting their fingers badly burned.